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EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO 

PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

EDUCATION for EFFICIENCY 

AND 

THE NEW DEFINITION OF 
THE CULTIVATED MAN 



BY 

CHARLES W. ELIOT 

PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, EMERITUS 




HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 



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COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Tvru Cooifis Received 

-CLASS /^ AXC No. 

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CONTENTS 

Introduction v 

I. Education for Efficiency ... i 

II. The New Definition of the Cultivated 

Man 31 

Outline 57 



INTRODUCTION 

The final product in teaching 

It would be well indeed if the teacher could see 
his final product, much as a sculptor beholds his 
statue. It would be worth something to to-mor- 
row's teaching if he could see the man of his 
moulding, walking about full-grown among his 
neighbors, performing his daily duties and graces. 
No other measure of our work equals the sight 
of the product put to its full uses. It is the best 
corrective to our blunders, the quickest encour- 
agement to efficient action. 

But this satisfaction is reserved for the lesser 
craftsmen of life. It is not given to the teacher 
to see the daily lesson emerge in the ultimate 
man. The full power of the teacher is exerted in 
one generation, that of his students in another. 
For him who teaches there is no final measure 
of the day's work. It lies somewhere beyond his 
vision in time and place. The next generation may 
attempt a full estimate of his labor, but he him- 
v 



INTRODUCTION 

self may not. He builds toward the dream-image 
of a man, ignorant of the final approximation. 

The partial influence of the teacher 

Even the changing child, stumbling youthfully 
over its lessons or boisterous at its play, is no fair 
measure of the passing influence of the teacher. 
School training is but a small part of life. Other 
conditions than those of classroom have swayed 
him for good or evil. Home and community 
have brought their vital pressure to bear. The 
teacher has been only one of the artificers in 
the making of this changing personality. In 
the maze of educative forces that have made the 
child what it is, his work is lost to recognition. 

The criteria of teaching 

Where, then, shall the teacher find the mea- 
sures for the hourly judgment of his teaching.? 
Standards there must be, if the intricate minis- 
try of teaching is to become more than a crude 
art where blind faith and subtle intuition, and the 
crude methods of trial and error, work out their 
ends together. Such standards are at hand to 
vi 



INTRODUCTION 

make teaching a rational profession. They are 
found in those qualities of the human personality 
which have an abiding worth under the tests of 
our civilization. They are the measures of per- 
sonal culture and social efficiency. The teaching 
that fosters these ends succeeds; the teaching 
which neglects them fails. 

What, then, are the marks of culture and effi- 
ciency .? We present here an interpretation, — the 
definitions of Mr. Charles W. Eliot. For forty 
years president of America's oldest and greatest 
university, for more than a quarter of a century 
an active leader in the reform of our lower schools, 
and for the same period of time a distinguished 
leader in our national life, no one is better fitted 
than he to suggest standards for the guidance of 
those who will teach our citizens. The two ad- 
dresses, "Education for Efficiency" and "The 
Definition of the Cultivated Man," constitute the 
treatment of one problem from two points of 
view. The scholar or the teacher who has long 
been used to a definition in terms of culture will 
readily recognize his own method of approach ; 
no less will the man of affairs who has been wont 
vii 



INTRODUCTION 

to measure the worth of schools in terms of the 
efficient life. It is the hope of the editor and the 
publishers that the contents of this volume will 
contribute to a wider and better understanding of 
the aims and standards of our education. 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Education for efficiency is my subject. By effi- 
ciency I mean effective power for work and ser- 
vice during a healthy and active life. This effect- 
ive power every individual man or woman should 
desire and strive to become possessed of ; and to 
the training and development of this power the 
education of each and every person should be 
directed. The efficient nation will be the nation 
made up, by aggregation, of individuals possess- 
ing this effective power; and national education 
will be effective in proportion as it secures in the 
masses the development of this power and its 
application in infinitely various forms to the 
national industries and the national service. 

Let me say at once that this education for effi- 
ciency is not a training which should cease with 
youth. On the contrary, it should be prolonged 
through adult years, until the powers of the mind 
I 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

and body begin with added years to decline. It 
has been too much the custom to think of edu- 
cation as an affair of youth, and even of the ear- 
lier years of youth ; but it really should be the 
work of the whole life. Because the large ma- 
jority of American children cease to go to school 
by the time they are fourteen years of age, it by 
no means follows that their education should 
cease at that early age. More and more, of late, 
regular and formal provision for a continued edu- 
cation is made in public school systems, through 
beneficent endowments and by private enterprise. 
The prolongation of the period of formal edu- 
cation for a considerable minority of American 
children, and the provision of summer schools, 
evening schools, trade schools, correspondence 
schools, business colleges, and reading circles of 
many sorts, with public libraries and book clubs, 
illustrate the increasing prevalence of the new 
idea that education is to be prolonged through 
adult life, and may be carried on in a systematic 
and active way long after the individual has begun 
to earn his livelihood in whole or in part. 

Now all education at every stage of life com- 

2 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

prehends two processes — l the training of powers 
and the acquisition of knowledge. 1 Childhood and 
youth are the time for acquiring new mental 
processes and functions and for exercising and 
strengthening the memory. The child initiates 
new processes of thought and establishes new 
mental habits much more easily than the adult ; 
but the adult, with trained powers, has an im- 
mense advantage over the child in the acquisition 
of information. The important thing in child- 
hood is, therefore, to train the child in as large a 
variety of mental processes as possible, and to es- 
tablish as many useful mental habits as possible. 
During this training an immense body of infor- 
mation will be incidentally acquired, but not so 
rapidly as the same person grown up can acquire 
it. Several years ago I gave a demonstration that 
a good high school graduate about eighteen years 
old could do in fifteen hours all the examples in 
arithmetic which the grammar school children in 
the same town did in two years, giving one fifth 
of their school-time to the subject in each year, 
after having studied arithmetic in the primary 
classes — that is, a youth of eighteen years could 
3 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

do in fifteen hours what grammar school children 
about twelve years of age required two fifths of 
their school-time for a whole year to accomplish. 
I have often known young men, twenty or twenty- 
one years of age, to master within three months 
the whole of the elementary requirement in Latin 
for admission to Harvard College — a require- 
ment which is supposed to imply a systematic 
course of five lessons a week, extending through 
at least the three years between fourteen and 
seventeen years of age. Many a practising law- 
yer in the prime of life will master in a few weeks 
the principles and the details of a complex sub- 
ject in science or art, in transportation or manu- 
facturing, with an accuracy and comprehensive- 
ness which enable him to deal successfully with 
the subject in competitive argument. Many an 
adult reader with trained habits of attention and 
concentration will absorb the contents of a book 
with a speed and retentiveness which no child 
can approach. The important things to accom- 
plish through education in youth are, therefore, 
the initiation of mental processes and the estab- 
lishment of good mental habits, with incidental 
4 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

acquisition of information. Continued education 
during adult life will provide increasing stores of 
information. Education for efficiency, individual 
or national, will take account of these different, 
but complementary advantages of youth and of 
maturity. 

The debate over the proper selection of studies 
in youth has been a long and wearisome one ; 
but at last two propositions are seen to command 
almost universal acceptance. The first is that chil- 
dren and young people should study the elements 
of a considerable variety of subjects, such as 
language, mathematics, history, natural science, 
sanitation, and economics, not with the primary 
purpose of obtaining information on those sub- 
jects, but in order that they may sample several 
kinds of knowledge, initiate the mental processes 
and habits appropriate to each, and have a chance 
to determine wisely in what direction their own 
individual mental powers can be best applied. 
The second is that training for power of work 
and service should be the prime object of educa- 
tion throughout life, no matter in what line the 
trained powers of the individual may be applied. 
5 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

This measure of consenting opinion frees me 
from the necessity of discussing the relative 
values of different subjects of study, and the dif- 
ferent meanings of the word cultivation, and en- 
ables me to ask your attention at once to the 
fundamental matters with which education for 
efficiency should deal. 

I take up first the training of the bodily senses 
and the care of the body. The training of sight, 
hearing, smell, taste, and touch has been neglected 
in education to a most extraordinary degree. In- 
deed, schools and urban conditions of life have 
actually impaired on a great scale the sense of 
sight — that best window of the soul. Quickness 
and accuracy in all the senses are of high value to 
the individual throughout life ; and in innumerable 
cases some slight but unusual superiority in one 
or more of the senses becomes the real basis of 
success in life. Thus, the father and son who 
made those wonderful glass models of flowers in 
the Museum of Harvard University inherited 
from generations of glass blowers, and developed 
in their own persons, an exquisite skill of eye and 
hand which gave them their unique success in 
6 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

that artistic craftsmanship. The skill of most good 
mechanics depends on the sure cooperative action 
of a practiced eye and a practiced hand. Most 
successful surgeons possess as the basis of their 
success an unusual accuracy of sight and touch 
combined with a sure memory in regional ana- 
tomy and a presence of mind which no emergency 
can perturb. The locomotive engineer, or the 
motorman on an electric car, needs a short-time 
reaction — that is, the interval between his sight 
of a signal, or of an object which presents itself 
suddenly, and the corresponding action of his 
hand and body must be very brief. This is a 
bodily quality which must be combined with a 
natural steadiness of mind and an indefatigable 
alertness. The training of the ear should come 
through reading aloud, reciting prose and poetry, 
and music. Education should try to increase sys- 
tematically pleasures through the ear to compen- 
sate for the horrid noises of urban life. The sense 
of smell deserves a careful training ; for it is the 
daily source of keen gratifications, the frequent 
renewer of mental associations, and the best 
natural protector against corrupted food, drink, 
7 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

and air. As a rule no attention is paid during 
systematic education to this invaluable sense. 
While the body is under training and after it 
has been trained it requires a steady and intelli- 
gent care which education for efficiency should 
systematically teach. Here again much remains 
to be done in all the educational systems of the 
civilized world. We have just begun to provide 
medical inspection for children and medical visi- 
tation for older students, and to teach system- 
atically the elements of personal hygiene and 
municipal sanitation. There is no longer any ex- 
cuse for neglect of these subjects. Twenty-five 
years ago the medical profession did not know 
how to prevent the spread of typhoid fever, or 
malarial fever, or how to combat diphtheria or ap- 
pendicitis or tuberculosis. Now medical science 
knows how to limit these evils and can do much 
to prevent their destructiveness. Within the same 
period the knowledge of civilized mankind con- 
cerning diets and the regimen of health has in- 
creased prodigiously ; and the means of heating 
and ventilating houses, factories, and meeting- 
places have been wonderfully improved. To 
8 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

teach all these things to the whole community 
should be an important part of education for effi- 
ciency ; for sickness suspends the efficiency of 
the individual and premature death destroys it, 
and when such losses are multiplied by the mil- 
lion, the national efficiency is gravely impaired. 
If education can succeed in prolonging the period 
of individual productiveness, and in preventing 
the breaks in that productiveness which sickness 
causes, it will thereby increase the total national 
productiveness and efficiency. It will also add 
greatly to the public happiness. 

Within recent years we have had abundant evi- 
dence in our own country and in many other 
countries that the most effective labor and the 
cheapest in proportion to its product is found 
where the laboring classes live comfortably, de- 
velop their intelligence, and widen their pros- 
pects. It is not the cheapest labor that is the 
most profitable, but the best fed and lodged, the 
healthiest, the most intelligent and the most 
ambitious. Since some of the fundamental con- 
ditions of well-being in the laboring classes are 
physical or bodily, so knowledge about the 
9 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

training and care of the body, where diffused 
through the whole population, ought to promote 
greatly that well-being. I have had the oppor- 
tunity of watching for more than fifty years suc- 
cessive ranks of young men going out from 
Harvard University into the work of the world, 
and I have seen in hundreds of them the develop- 
ment of character and the issue or results of that 
development. Anyone who has used such an op- 
portunity will inevitably be an optimist concern- 
ing the effects and potentialities of education. 
As a rule, the comparison of the educated man 
of sixty with the same person at twenty is won- 
derfully encouraging and stimulating with regard 
to the average effects on human beings of edu- 
cation and the discipline of life ; but such an 
optimist will confess, if he is candid, that the 
bodily excellences and virtues count very much 
toward this favorable result. It seems to me, as I 
review the life-failures I have witnessed, that the 
only cases of hopeless ruin are those in which 
the body has first been ruined through neglect 
or vice, or was congenitally perverted and made 
the victim of criminal propensities. If, through 

10 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

drink or licentiousness or other vicious habits, 
the body of an educated man is ruined, there may 
be no recovery possible for that individual in this 
world ; but whenever the body has escaped de- 
struction and remains in tolerably sound condi- 
tion there are few moral wrecks which may not 
be, to all seeming, completely repaired in this 
world. These considerations emphasize strongly 
the importance of making the means of protect- 
ing, caring for, and improving the body an im- 
portant part of education for efficiency. 

The next thing which education for efficiency 
should attend to is the imparting of the habit of 
quick and concentrated attention. Without this 
habit there can be no true economy of time. A 
prolonged attention is not natural to children, 
and should not be demanded of them ; but quick 
and concentrated attention may be reasonably 
expected for brief intervals from every child, and 
as the age increases the possible period of close 
attention will grow longer and longer. The differ- 
ence between adults in mental efficiency is chiefly 
a difference in this very power of concentrated 
attention. The man who has this power will grasp 
II 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

quickly new subjects presented to him, gratify 
people who have business with him by giving 
them prompt and effective attention, seize eagerly 
upon the contents of books or papers which re- 
late to the affair in hand, and despatch his daily 
work, whatever its nature — mechanical, com- 
mercial, scholarly, or administrative. He will do 
in one minute the work for which an inferior man 
will need five minutes or five hours. He will effect 
in every day of his life a great economy of time. 
There will be no dawdling or vague dreaming in 
the action of his mind. His thoughts will not be 
a rope of sand, but a chain of welded links. The 
great thinkers and doers, philosophers and inven- 
tors, soldiers and rulers are alike in possessing 
in the highest degree this power of concentrated 
attention ; and in common men and women this 
is the most valuable of all mental faculties. To 
rouse, awake, inculcate, and train this power in 
the child and the youth should be a principal ob- 
ject in education for efficiency. We say of the 
child in whom this power does not seem to exist 
that he cannot apply himself, that he cannot be 
made to study, or that he does not set his mind 

12 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

at work. For every such child the main problem 
is to discover the means of interesting him in a 
mental occupation enough to induce him to con- 
centrate his attention. Skill in discovering the 
means of interesting the childish mind enough 
to compel attention is characteristic of the good 
teacher. If oral instruction does not gain a close 
attention, perhaps books will ; if books fail, car- 
penter's tools, cook's tools, a lathe, an embroidery 
frame, or a forge may succeed ; if mechanical 
work does not rouse the mental forces, perhaps 
drawing or modelling will; if all other means fail, 
the training of the power of attention may be 
begun through music. The modern biographies 
which give us an insight into the working of the 
minds of their subjects, such as the biographies 
of Huxley, Darwin, Pasteur, Tennyson, Cavour, 
Lincoln, and Gladstone, show us the power of 
concentrated attention as the fundamental source 
of the prodigious productiveness of great workers. 
It may seem strange to say so, but it is per- 
fectly plain to persons who have been carefully 
observing the rising generations that education 
for efficiency must especially endeavor to induce 
13 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

young people to think. The incessant hurry and 
trivial activity of daily life which now characterize 
childhood and youth, as well as maturity, seem 
to prevent, or at least discourage, quiet and in- 
tense thinking, and particularly that inventive 
thinking, which is something more than sorting 
or putting in order materials supplied to the mind 
from without. The public press no longer in- 
vites its readers to sustained thought. Instead of 
a book, it gives them a six-page magazine article ; 
instead of a half-column editorial, a three-line 
"brevity," which is often cast in a comical form. 
The average reader of the newspaper or the short 
story reads to forget, not to remember. He rarely 
has any intention of digesting and assimilating 
what he reads. For the most part, he rejects 
what he reads without even swallowing it. In 
former times reading seems to have involved 
some deliberate thinking on the part of the reader. 
It no longer does. Much of our daily reading is 
correctly described as mental dissipation. In 
school and college, the amplest use is made of 
helps to learning. Manuals and treatises facili- 
tate to the utmost the acquisition of the pre- 
14 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

scribed quantities of knowledge ; and tutors and 
professors offer additional aids, and almost suc- 
ceed in doing for their pupils the necessary mini- 
mum of thinking and willing. Now the efficient 
man is the man who thinks for himself, and is 
capable of thinking hard and long. This is a pro- 
cess which requires motive and will-power. Out 
in the world the motives are often pleasure in 
the exercise of power, or satisfaction in the get- 
ting of money or what money can buy ; but obvi- 
ously these motives are not immediately appli- 
cable during the period of education. The problem 
education for efficiency has to solve is how to 
stimulate young people to think in the absence 
of these pressing motives of the real world. 
Since consecutive thinking absolutely requires 
personal initiative, or a compulsion from within 
and not from without, there must be a motive for 
this compelling action of the will. One available 
motive is supplied by experience of the enjoy- 
ment or satisfaction which good thinking yields 
to the thinker ; but this motive can be roused to 
activity in the study of those subjects only which 
have a natural interest for the young thinker. 
15 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Hence the importance of discovering early those 
subjects for each individual. Another motive is 
the conviction that winning the best satisfactions 
of later life will depend on possessing this power 
to think. It is this conviction which converts a 
listless undergraduate into a diligent student of 
law or medicine. The teacher, the parent, or the 
friend can often do much to implant this convic- 
tion and to guide the pupil into an enjoyment of 
thinking ; but that is about all the teacher or 
older friend can do. The school and college can- 
not use the method of Nature, — root, hog, or die, 
— and the more elaborate the schools and colleges 
become, and the more ingenious their methods 
of teaching and of helping, the less can they use 
the compulsions which depend on fear of pain, 
poverty, obscurity, and dependence. The unthink- 
ing mind is not necessarily dull, rude, or imper- 
vious ; it is probably simply empty, or occupied 
from moment to moment with unconnected trivi- 
alities. On the other hand, the thinking mind is 
as far as possible from the lazy mind. It may 
be meditative, reflective, or rudimentary ; it will 
probably be abstracted or withdrawn from the 
i6 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

external incidents of the moment, but it must be 
hard at work. To inspire the motive for this hard 
work at an early age, and to train the power of 
consecutive thinking, is the gravest problem in 
education for efficiency. The influence which de- 
velops the necessary motive in the thinking child 
or youth is, in most cases, a personal influence, 
which is partly stimulus, but more example. 
This influence should rather lead than drive ; for 
the personal initiative in thinking is indispen- 
sable. The fortunate child is the one who gets 
at home this inspiration and guidance toward 
thinking. The power comes almost unconsciously 
to the child that grows up in a thoughtful home ; 
but such homes are rare indeed. If the home can- 
not yield this influence, the next thing to hope 
for is that the child may come under the influ- 
ence of a teacher who thinks and inspires think- 
ing. The well-to-do parent who has an unthinking 
child may be wisely advised to search diligently 
from school to school for the teacher that can 
have that effect on his child. In the technical 
school or the college the student will probably 
get the chance of coming under the influence of 
17 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

an enthusiastic specialist in the subject which the 
student affects; and this specialist may be a 
thinking man who leads his pupils to think. It 
has been imagined that science and laboratory 
work must be peculiarly thought-compelling; 
but this may not be at all true in the elementary 
stages of education. There are mechanical ways 
of cramming scientific facts and doing laboratory 
work; just as there are pigeon-hole methods of 
accumulating and sorting materials and " sources " 
in philological and historical work. The manual, 
the syllabus, and the coach are now as well de- 
veloped for scientific subjects as for literary. In 
teaching the young to think hard, any subject 
will answer. The problem is to get them to weigh 
evidence, draw accurate inferences, make fair 
comparisons, invent solutions, and form judg- 
ments ; and this is the serious problem in all 
education for efficiency. 

Another leading object in education for effi- 
ciency is the cultivation of the critical discern- 
ment of beauty and excellence in things and in 
words and thoughts, in nature and in human 
nature. We associate the word " criticism " with 
l8 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

the discernment of defects and inferiorities, and 
the mind we ordinarily call critical is apt to have 
a keener scent for faults, mistakes, and offences 
than for merits, wise judgments, and right ac- 
tions ; but the faculty for discerning quickly and 
surely excellences and virtues in persons, peoples, 
nature, and art is an immeasurably more valuable 
and useful faculty than the faculty for seeing 
weaknesses and sins. It ought to be carefully 
and incessantly cultivated by school, college, and 
the experience of life, for it is capable of con- 
tributing greatly to happiness as well as to ma- 
terial success. The faculty of discerning and 
using conspicuous merit in other people distin- 
guishes the most successful administrators, rulers, 
and men of business. It is the habit of picking 
out beauties and excellences in mixed characters 
and mixed scenes, or in events containing both 
good and evil, which provides a firm foundation 
for satisfaction and content in daily life. This 
critical faculty for beauty and virtue in things 
and people can be cultivated to a high degree 
from early childhood throughout life, or it can be 
repressed and overborne by the opposite habit, 
19 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

which ordinary conversation and the daily press 
tend to foster, of attending to abnormal evils, 
crimes, and disasters, rather than to the normal 
fortunate course of events. Towards this habit- 
ual cultivation, what is called "nature study" is 
of great use, because nature is full of abounding 
beauties and excellences and of perfect adapta- 
tions of means to ends. To be sure, it is full too 
of ugliness, imperfections, and defects, but the 
order and stability of the natural world as it ap- 
pears to human senses, and the proved fitness of 
the world to develop in man^his noblest faculties, 
testify to the immense preponderance of good 
over evil in the universe as it appears to man. 
Is it not strange that the introduction of the 
study of nature into schools and colleges should 
have been, reserved for the nineteenth century ? 
Is it not stranger still that the garden as a means 
of teaching children should never have been used 
in public school systems till within the last few 
years? The blackboard is an old invention like 
the sand table, but how does it compare with a 
garden plot as a means of teaching the critical 
discernment of beauty and excellence.? It is char- 

20 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

acteristic of the advance of mankind toward civ- 
ilization that men become more and more sensible 
of the good in the world and less and less appre- 
hensive of the evil. In civilized society every child 
ought to be drilled in the critical discernment and 
appreciation of excellence and beauty, physical, 
mental, and moral. Should we not all be vastly 
more charitable in our judgments of people if we 
were in the habit of looking for th^ excellences 
in people's bodies, minds, and hearts, rather than 
for the defects } No man and no woman possesses 
perfect beauty, but most people possess some 
beauties ; no man and no woman possesses a per- 
fect character, but most men and women possess 
solid virtues, however their virtues may be mixed 
with vices. Let us teachers take thought for 
teaching on a great scale the habitual discern- 
ment of superiorities rather than of inferiorities. 
Another faculty which all schools and colleges, 
all churches and all social institutions, and the 
experience of adult life should cultivate inces- 
santly is the judicial faculty for the wise enjoy- 
ment of liberty. For savage or semi-civilized men, 
and for some children who pass through barbaric 

21 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

stages of development, authority is needed to re- 
strain them from injuring themselves or others; 
but the diminishing part played by authority in 
the family and the commonwealth, and the in- 
creasing room and need for individual liberty are 
characteristic of what we call modern civilization. 
The reason is that the will power of the individ- 
ual is the taproot of all his growth in character 
and efficiency. Authority curbs the will power of 
the individual ; liberty gives it play and exercises 
it. Therefore the training of the will to the wise 
use of liberty is the great means of developing 
individual strength of character and national 
greatness. The child or youth of weak will is the 
one that his teachers will find most difficult to 
train or to inspire. The nation which is impulsive, 
flighty, fickle, and hysterical will go down before 
the steady, considerate, phlegmatic, and resolute 
nation. Whatever else a school or a university 
may do for its pupils, if it does not implant the 
love of liberty and cultivate the lawful and pro- 
ductive use of liberty, that school or university 
will have failed to render its highest service to 
the youth under its charge. As a rule, universi- 

22 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

ties have been schools of liberty, but there have 
been grave exceptions, like that of Oxford in 
Gladstone's time. The wise use of liberty, whether 
by an individual or a nation, can only be learnt 
by practice, and through the passing down from 
generation to generation of a gradually accumu- 
lated stock of public liberty ; and since the gov- 
ernments of the civilized world are evidently to 
be based on a broad suffrage, it is of the utmost 
importance to the peaceful progress of mankind 
that the love of liberty should be inculcated and 
the practice of individual liberty should be sys- 
tematically taught in the family and in all insti- 
tutions of education. It becomes teachers, espe- 
cially, to bear always in mind, and to observe in 
dealing with children, the principle that it is lib- 
erty alone which fits men for liberty, as Gladstone 
wrote in 1882 about local government for Ireland. 
The nineteenth century brought into the world 
for the service of education, as well as for the 
service of industries and government, the new 
temper of mind called the scientific; and the ef- 
fects of this new temper or spirit have been no- 
thing less than revolutionary. What is the real 
23 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

essence of this new temper or spirit, so far as it 
affects, or should affect, education? Is not its 
real essence the passion for truth, or for the fact, 
as distinguished from the guess, or the imagina- 
tion ? Is it not the preference for sound premises 
over logical trains of reasoning on doubtful pre- 
mises? Is it not the conviction that action should 
be based not on shadowy inference or ingenious 
speculation, but on solid fact ? The implanting of 
the love of truth as the opposite of error and of 
falsehood is surely one of the greatest contribu- 
tions that education can make to individual effi- 
ciency ; for the human powers, if they are to be 
efficiently used, must be exerted in accordance 
with the natural and moral law, or, in other words, 
in accordance with the facts of the world. This 
principle holds true in the least events and acts 
of the individual's life, as well as in the play of 
broad, national forces. If one wants to dam a little 
brook on his own farm, he must know whether 
he can get a water-tight foundation for his dam. 
If the United States means to maintain success- 
fully a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, the 
designers of the canal must know the extreme 
24 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

rainfall of the watershed of the Isthmus, and the 
habits of the river Chagres. Such an enterprise, 
small or large, can succeed only on firm founda- 
tions of truth or fact.)ijf the primary school 
teacher longs to stir the sluggish mind of one of 
her scholars, she must first find out what the 
sluggishness is due to — to poor food, to bad air, 
to adenoid growths, to astigmatic or near-sighted 
eyes, to dull hearing, or to fear, or shyness, or a 
broken will. She must find out the facts of the 
case before she can deal with it. She must learn 
the truth about that child before she can set it 
frecV^n order to cultivate the love of truth, it is 
of the utmost consequence that children should 
study things as well as words, external nature as 
well as books, living persons as well as pictures 
and descriptions of persons, events which take 
place before their eyes as well as stories of long 
past events. This is the explanation of the value 
of productive labor to the child or youth, provided 
always that the labor be proportionate to the 
pupil's strength and yield him some return which 
he values. Productive labor deals with facts, and 
is productive only so far as it conforms to the 
25 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

truth of things. The search for truth is the new 
passion and religion of to-day. It has been the 
most effective altruism of the nineteenth century. 
It rouses the enthusiastic devotion of many fine 
natures, inspires self-denial, patience, and cour- 
age, and makes men and women content to un- 
dergo hardships and to brave perils. With the 
love of truth often goes the love of freedom, and 
these two loves together are capable of inspiring 
and directing the most efficient human lives. That 
is a wonderful prophecy in John viii, 32: "Ye 
shall know the truth and the truth shall make 
you free." It follows from this doctrine that the 
most important quality in a teacher, whether for 
children or for adults, is genuine and transparent 
truthfulness. No other qualities, however brilliant, 
can compensate for the absence of this quality in 
a teacher. In the same way and for the same rea- 
son, no quality is so valuable as truthfulness in 
the leaders of a free people, simply because truth- 
telling and truth-doing lie at the foundation of 
national efficiency. In a modern world a nation 
is effective in proportion to its truthfulness, 
or, in other words, in proportion as it keeps its 
26 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

thinking, speaking, and acting in accord with 
facts. 

Finally, education for efficiency should supply 
every pupil with the motive power of some en- 
thusiasm or devotion. The real motive power 
in every human life, and in all national life, is 
sentiment; and the highest efficiency cannot be 
produced in any human being unless his whole 
character and his whole activity be dominated by 
some sentiment or passion. An evil passion may 
give great physical and intellectual powers a ter- 
rible efficiency. A good passion can make or- 
dinary talents extraordinarily effective. A life 
without a prevailing enthusiasm is sure not to rise 
to its highest level. These private enthusiasms 
or devotions are fortunately almost as various as 
are the characters of men. There are also bene- 
ficent enthusiasms which pervade, simultane- 
ously, multitudes of human beings and give them 
a common effectiveness. At this moment a gre- 
garious enthusiasm for social service inspires a 
considerable proportion of educated American 
youth. Anyone who has read many biographies 
will have perceived that the guiding enthusiasm 

27 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

of a life often springs early into view, and that 
this is almost always the case in the most effec- 
tive human beings. The youth has a vision of 
the life he would like to live, of the service he 
would choose to render, of the power he would 
prefer to exercise; and for fifty years he pur- 
sues this vision. In almost all great men the 
leading idea of the life is caught early, or a prin- 
ciple or thesis comes to mind during youth which 
the entire adult life is too short to develop thor- 
oughly. Most great teachers have started with a 
theory, or a single idea or group of ideas, to the 
working out of which in practice they have given 
their lives. Many great preachers have really had 
but one theme. Many architects have devoted 
themselves, with inexhaustible enthusiasm, to a 
single style in architecture. Some of the greatest 
soldiers have fought all their battles by one sort 
of strategy adopted in their youth. Many great 
rulers have harped all their lives on only one 
string of national or racial sentiment. Among 
men of science the instances are innumerable in 
which a whole life has been devoted to the pa- 
tient pursuit of a single vision seen in youth. For 
28 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

common men and women two or three of the 
common loves will suffice — the love of family 
and home, of school and church, of mountain 
and sea, of nature and books, of private and pub- 
lic liberty, of truth and justice. For us teach- 
ers it is indeed an inspiring fact that effective 
and enduring enthusiasms spring up spontane- 
ously, or may be implanted in early life ; for 
without them education cannot procure the high- 
est efficiency, either during youth, or for the 
after-life. Education for efficiency must not be 
materialistic, prosaic, or utilitarian ; it must be 
idealistic, humane, and passionate, or it will not 
win its goal. 



THE NEW DEFINITION OF 
THE CULTIVATED MAN 



II 

THE NEW DEFINITION OF 
THE CULTIVATED MAN 

To produce the cultivated man, or at least the 
man capable of becoming cultivated in after-life, 
has long been supposed to be one of the funda- 
mental objects of systematic and thorough edu- 
cation. The ideal of general cultivation has been 
one of the standards in education. It is often 
asked : Will the education which a given insti- 
tution is supplying produce the cultivated man ? 
Or, Can cultivation be the result of a given course 
of study ? In such questions there is an implica- 
tion that the education which does not produce 
the cultivated man is a failure, or has been mis- 
conceived, or misdirected. Now, if cultivation 
were an unchanging ideal, the steady use of the 
conception as a permanent test of educational 
processes might be justified; but if the culti- 
vated man of to-day is, or ought to be, a distinctly 
different creature from the cultivated man of a 
33 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

century ago, the ideal of cultivation cannot be 
appealed to as a standard without preliminary ex- 
planations and interpretations. It is the object of 
this paper to show that the idea of cultivation in 
the highly trained human being has undergone 
substantial changes during the last century. 

I ought to say at once that I propose to use 
the term " cultivated man " in only its good sense 
— in Emerson's sense. In this paper, he is not 
to be a weak, critical, fastidious creature, vain of 
a little exclusive information or of an uncommon 
knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic ; he 
is to be a man of quick perceptions, broad sym- 
pathies, and wide affinities ; responsive, but inde- 
pendent ; self-reliant, but deferential ; loving truth 
and candor, but also moderation and proportion ; 
courageous, but gentle ; not finished, but perfect- 
ing. All authorities agree that true culture is not 
exclusive, sectarian, or partisan, but the very op- 
posite ; that it is not to be attained in solitude, 
but in society ; and that the best atmosphere for 
culture is that of a school, university, academy, 
or church, where many pursue together the ideals 
of truth, righteousness, and love. 
34 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

Here someone may think: This process of 
cultivation is evidently a long, slow, artificial 
process ; I prefer the genius, the man of native 
power or skill, the man whose judgment is sound 
and influence strong, though he cannot read or 
write — the born inventor, orator, or poet. So do 
we all. Men have always reverenced prodigious 
inborn gifts, and always will. Indeed, barbarous 
men always say of the possessors of such gifts : 
These are not men, they are gods. But we teach- 
ers who carry on a system of popular education, 
which is by far the most complex and valuable 
invention of this century, know that we have to 
do, not with the highly gifted units, but with the 
millions who are more or less capable of being 
cultivated by the long, patient, artificial training 
called education. For us and our system, the 
genius is no standard, but the cultivated man is. 
To his stature we and many of our pupils may in 
time attain. 

There are two principal differences between 
the present ideal of cultivation and that which 
prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. All thinkers agree that the horizon of the 
35 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

human intellect has widened wonderfully during 
the past hundred years, and that the scientific 
method of inquiry, which was known to but very 
few when the nineteenth century began, has been 
the means of that widening. This method has be- 
cpme indispensable in all fields of inquiry, in- 
cluding psychology, philanthropy, and religion ; 
and therefore intimate acquaintance with it has 
become an indispensable element in culture. As 
Matthew Arnold pointed out more than a gen- 
eration ago, educated mankind is governed by 
two passions — one the passion for pure know- 
ledge, the other the passion for being of service 
or doing good. Now, the passion for pure know- 
ledge is to be gratified only through the scientific 
method of inquiry. In Arnold's phrases the first 
step for every aspirant to culture is to endeavor 
to see things as they are, or " to learn, in short, 
the will of God." The second step is to make 
that will prevail, each in his own sphere of action 
and influence. This recognition of science as pure 
knowledge, and of the scientific method as the 
universal method of inquiry, is the great addition 
made by the nineteenth century to the idea of 

36 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

culture. I need not say that within that century 
what we call science, pure and applied, has trans- 
formed the world as the scene of the human 
drama; and that it is this transformation which 
has compelled the recognition of natural science 
as a fundamental necessity in liberal education. 
The most convinced exponents and advocates of 
humanism now recognize that science is the 
"paramount force of the modern, as distinguished 
from the antique and the mediaeval spirit," ^ and 
that "an interpenetration of humanism with 
science, and of science with humanism, is the 
condition of the highest culture." 

A second modification of the earlier idea of 
cultivation was advocated by Ralph Waldo Em- 
erson more than two generations ago. He taught 
that the acquisition of some form of manual skill 
and the practice of some form of manual labor 
were essential elements of culture. This idea has 
more and more become accepted in the system- 
atic education of youth ; and if we include ath- 
letic sports among the desirable forms of manual 
skill and labor, we may say that during the last 

ijohn Addington Symonds, Culture, 

37 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

thirty years this element of excellence of body in 
the ideal of education has had a rapid, even an 
exaggerated, development. The idea of some 
sort of bodily excellence was, to be sure, not ab- 
sent in the old conception of the cultivated man. 
The gentleman could ride well, dance gracefully, 
and fence with skill. But the modern conception 
of bodily skill as an element in cultivation is 
more comprehensive, and includes that habitual 
contact with the external world which Emerson 
deemed essential to real culture. We have lately 
become convinced that accurate work with car- 
penters' tools, or lathe, or hammer and anvil, or 
violin, or piano, or pencil, or crayon, or camel's- 
hair brush, trains well the same nerves and gan- 
glia with which we do what is ordinarily called 
thinking. We have also become convinced that 
some intimate, sympathetic acquaintance with 
the natural objects of the earth and sky adds 
greatly to the happiness of life, and that this ac- 
quaintance should be begun in childhood and be 
developed all through adolescence and maturity. 
A brook, a hedgerow, or a garden is an inex- 
haustible teacher of wonder, reverence, and love. 
38 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

The scientists insist to-day on nature study for 
children ; but we teachers ought long ago to have 
learned from the poets the value of this element 
in education. They are the best advocates of na- 
ture study. If any are not convinced of its worth, 
then let them go to Theocritus, Virgil, Words- 
worth, Tennyson, or Lowell for the needed de- 
monstration. Let them observe, too, that a great 
need of modern industrial society is intellectual 
pleasures, or pleasure which, like music, combines 
delightful sensations with the gratifications of 
observation, association, memory, and sympathy. 
The idea of culture has always included a quick 
and wide sympathy with men ; it should here- 
after include sympathy with nature, and particu- 
larly with its living forms, a sympathy based on 
some accurate observation of nature. The book- 
worm, the monk, the isolated student, has never 
been the type of the cultivated man. Society has 
seemed the natural setting for the cultivated per- 
son, man or woman ; but the present conception 
of real culture contains not only a large develop- 
ment of this social element, but also an exten- 
sion of interest and reverence to the animated 
39 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

creation and to those immense forces that set 
the earthly stage for man and all related beings. 

Let us now proceed to examine some of the 
changes in the idea of culture, or in the available 
means of culture, which the last hundred years 
have brought about. 

I. The moral sense of the modern world makes 
character a more important element than it used 
to be in the ideal of a cultivated man. Now, char- 
acter is formed, as Goethe said, in the "stream 
of the world " — not in stillness or isolation, but 
in the quick-flowing tides of the busy world, the 
world of nature and the world of mankind. At 
the end of the nineteenth century the world was 
wonderfully different from the world at the begin- 
ning of that eventful period ; and, moreover, men's 
means of making acquaintance with the world 
were vastly ampler than they were a hundred years 
earlier. To the old idea of culture some know- 
ledge of history was indispensable. Now, history 
is a representation of the stream of the world, or 
of some little portion of that stream, one hundred, 
five hundred, two thousand years ago. Acquaint- 
ance with some part of the present stream ought 
40 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

to be more formative of character, and more in- 
structive as regards external nature and the na- 
ture of man, than any partial survey of the stream 
that was flowing centuries ago. We have, then, 
through the present means of reporting the 
stream of the world from day to day, material for 
culture such as no preceding generation of men 
has possessed. The cultivated man or woman 
must use the means which steam and electricity 
have provided for reporting the play of physical 
forces and of human volitions which make the 
world of to-day; for the world of to-day supplies 
in its immense variety a picture of all stages of 
human progress, from the stone age, through 
savagery, barbarism, and mediaevalism, to what 
we now call civilization. The rising generation 
should think hard, and feel keenly, just where the 
men and women who constitute the actual human 
world are thinking and feeling most to-day. The 
panorama of to-day's events is not an accurate or 
complete picture, for history will supply posterity 
with much evidence which is hidden from the 
eyes of contemporaries ; but it is nevertheless an 
Invaluable and a new means of developing good 
41 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

judgment, good feeling, and the passion for social 
service ; or, in other words, of securing cultiva- 
tion. But someone will say : The stream of the 
world is foul. True in part. The stream is, what 
it has been, a mixture of foulness and purity, of 
meanness and majesty ; but it has nourished indi- 
vidual virtue and race civilization. Literature and 
history are a similar mixture, and yet are the tra- 
ditional means of culture. Are not the Greek 
tragedies means of culture ^ Yet they are full of 
incest, murder, and human sacrifices to lustful 
and revengeful gods. 

II. A cultivated man should express himself by 
tongue or pen with some accuracy and elegance ; 
therefore, linguistic training has had great impor- 
tance in the idea of cultivation. The conditions 
of the educated world have, however, changed so 
profoundly since the revival of learning in Italy 
that our inherited ideas concerning training in 
language and literature have required large modi- 
fications. In the year 1400, it might have been 
said with truth that there was but one language 
of scholars, the Latin, and but two great litera- 
tures, the Hebrew and the Greek. Since that 
42 



THF CULTIVATED MAN 

time, however, other great literatures have arisen, 
the Itahan, Spanish, French, German, and above 
all the English, which has become incomparably 
the most extensive and various and the noblest 
of literatures. Under these circumstances it is 
impossible to maintain that a knowledge of any- 
particular literature is indispensable to culture. 
Yet we cannot but feel that the cultivated man 
ought to possess a considerable acquaintance 
with the literature of some great language, and 
the power to use the native language in a pure 
and interesting way. Thus, we are not sure that 
Robert Burns could be properly described as a 
cultivated man, moving poet though he was. We 
do not think of Abraham Lincoln as a cultivated 
man, master of English speech and writing 
though he was. These men do not correspond to 
the type represented by the word " cultivated," 
but belong in the class of geniuses. When we 
ask ourselves why a knowledge of literature 
seems indispensable to the ordinary idea of cul- 
tivation, we find no answer except this, that in 
literature are portrayed all human passions, de- 
sires, and aspirations, and that acquaintance with 
43 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

these human feelings, and with the means of 
portraying them, seems to us essential to culture. 
These human qualities and powers are also the 
commonest ground of interesting human inter- 
course, and therefore literary knowledge exalts 
the quality and enhances the enjoyment of hu- 
man intercourse. It is in conversation that culti- 
vation tells as much as anywhere, and this rapid 
exchange of thoughts is by far the commonest 
manifestation of its power> Combine the know- 
ledge of literature with knowledge of the " stream 
of the world," and you have united two large 
sources of the influence of the cultivated person. 
The linguistic and literary element in cultivation 
therefore abides, but has become vastly broader 
than formerly; so broad, indeed, that selection 
among its various fields is forced upon every edu- 
cated youth. 

III. The next great element in cultivation to 
which I ask your attention is acquaintance with 
some part of the store of knowledge which hu- 
manity in its progress from barbarism has ac- 
quired and laid up. This is the prodigious store 
of recorded, rationalized, and systematized dis- 
44 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

coveries, experiences, and ideas. This is the store 
which we teachers try to pass on to the rising 
generation. The capacity to assimilate this store 
and improve it in each successive generation is 
the distinction of the human race over other ani- 
mals. It is too vast for any man to master, though 
he had a hundred lives instead of one ; and its 
growth in the nineteenth century was greater 
than in all the thirty preceding centuries put 
together. In the eighteenth century a diligent 
student, with quick powers of apprehension and 
strong memory, need not have despaired of mas- 
tering a large fraction of this store of knowledge. 
Long before the end of the nineteenth century 
such a task had become impossible. Culture, 
therefore, can no longer imply a knowledge of 
everything — not even a little knowledge of 
everything. It must be content with general 
knowledge of some things, and a real mastery of 
some small portion of the human store. Here is 
a profound modification of the idea of cultivation 
which the nineteenth century has brought about. 
What portion or portions of the infinite human 
store are most proper to the cultivated man ? The 
45 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

answer must be: Those which enable him, with his 
individual personal qualities, to deal best and sym- 
pathize most with nature and with other human 
beings. It is here that the passion for service 
must fuse with the passion for knowledge. It is 
natural to imagine that the young man who has 
acquainted himself with economics, the science 
of government, sociology, and the history of civi- 
lization in its motives, objects, and methods, has 
a better chance of fusing the passion for know- 
ledge with the passion for doing good than the 
man whose passion for pure knowledge leads him' 
to the study of chemical or physical phenomena, 
or of the habits and climatic distribution of plants 
or animals. Yet, so intricate are the relations 
of human beings to the animate and inanimate 
creation that it is impossible to foresee with what 
realms of nature intense human interests may 
prove to be identified. Thus the generation now 
on the stage has suddenly learned that some of 
the most sensitive and exquisite human interests, 
such as health or disease, and life or death for 
those we love, are bound up with the life-histo- 
ries of parasites on the blood corpuscles or of cer- 

46 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

tain varieties of mosquitoes and ticks. When the 
spectra of the sun, stars, and other lights began 
to be studied, there was not the slightest antici- 
pation that a cure for one of the most horrible 
diseases to which mankind is liable might be 
found in the X-rays. While, then, we can still see 
that certain subjects afford more obvious or fre- 
quent access to means of doing good and to for- 
tunate intercourse with our fellows than other 
subjects, we have learned that there is no field 
of real knowledge which may not suddenly prove 
contributory in a high degree to human happi- 
ness and the progress of civilization, and there- 
fore acceptable as a worthy element in the truest 
culture. 

IV. The only other element in cultivation 
which time will permit me to treat is the train- 
ing of the constructive imagination. The imagi- 
nation is the greatest" of human powers, no mat- 
ter in what field it works — in art or literature, 
in mechanical invention, in science, government, 
commerce, or religion ; and the training of the 
iniagination is, therefore, far the most important 
part of education. I use the term "constructive 
47 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

imagination " because that implies the creation 
or building of a new thing. The sculptor, for 
example, imagines or conceives the perfect form 
of a child ten years of age. He has never seen 
such a thing, for a child perfect in form is never 
produced ; he has only seen in different children 
the elements of perfection, here one element and 
there another. In his imagination he combines 
these elements of the perfect form, which he has 
only seen separated, and from this picture in his 
mind he carves the stone, and in the execution 
invariably loses his ideal — that is, falls short 
of it, or fails to express it. Sir Joshua Reynolds 
points out that the painter can picture only what 
he has somewhere seen ; but that the more he 
has seen and noted, the surer he is to be original 
in his painting, because his imaginary combina- 
tions will be original. Constructive imagination 
is the great power of the poet as well as of the 
artist ; and the nineteenth century has convinced 
us that it is also the great power of the man of 
science, the investigator, and the natural philo- 
sopher. What gives every great naturalist or 
physicist his epoch-making results is precisely 
48 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

the imaginative power by which he deduces 
from masses of fact the guiding hypothesis or 
principle. 

The educated world needs to recognize the 
new varieties of constructive imagination. Dante 
gave painful years to picturing on many pages 
of his immortal comedy of hell, purgatory, and 
paradise the most horrible monsters and tortures, 
and the most loathsome and noisome abomina- 
tions, that his fervid imagination could concoct 
out of his own bitter experiences and the man- 
ners and customs of his cruel times. Sir Charles 
Lyell spent many laborious years in searching 
for and putting together the scattered evidences 
that the geological processes by which the crust 
of the earth has been made ready for the use of 
man have been, in the main, not catastrophic, but 
gradual and gentle ; and that the forces which 
have been in action through past ages are, for 
the most part, similar to those we may see to-day 
eroding hills, cutting canons, making placers, 
marshes, and meadows, and forming prairies and 
ocean floors. He first imagined, and then demon- 
strated, that the geologic agencies are not ex- 
49 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

plosive and cataclysmal, but steady and patient. 
These two kinds of imagination — Dante's and 
Lyell's — are not comparable, but both are mani- 
festations of great human power. Zola in La 
Bite humaine contrives that ten persons, all con- 
nected with the railroad from Paris to Havre, 
shall be either murderers or murdered, or both, 
within eighteen months ; and he adds two rail- 
road slaughters criminally procured. The condi- 
tions of time and place are ingeniously imagined, 
and no detail is omitted which can heighten the 
effect of this homicidal fiction. Contrast this kind 
of constructive imagination with the kind which 
conceived the great wells sunk in the solid rock 
below Niagara that contain the turbines, that 
drive the dynamos, that generate the electric 
force that turns thousands of wheels and lights 
thousands of lamps over hundreds of square miles 
of adjoining territory ; or with the kind which con- 
ceives the sending of human thoughts across three 
thousand miles of stormy sea instantaneously, 
on nothing more substantial than ethereal waves. 
There is no crime, cruelty, or lust about these 
last two sorts of imagining. No lurid fire of hell 
SO 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

or human passion illumines their scenes. They 
are calm, accurate, just, and responsible ; and 
nothing but beneficence and increased human 
well-being results from them. There is room in 
the hearts of twentieth-century men for a high 
admiration of these kinds of imagination, as well 
as for that of the poet, artist, or dramatist. 

Another kind of imagination deserves a mo- 
ment's consideration — the receptive imagination 
which entertains and holds fast the visions genius 
creates or the analogies of nature suggest. A 
young woman is absorbed for hours in conning 
the squalid scenes and situations through which 
Thackeray portrays the malign motives and un- 
clean soul of Becky Sharp. Another young 
woman watches for days the pairing, nesting, 
brooding, and foraging of two robins that have 
established home and family in the notch of a 
maple near her window. She notes the unselfish 
labors of the father and mother for each other 
and for their little ones, and weaves into the 
simple drama all sorts of protective instincts and 
human affections. Here are two employments for 
the receptive imagination. Shall systematic edu- 
51 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

cation compel the first, but make no room for 
the second ? The increasing attention to nature 
study suggests the hope that the imaginative 
study of human ills and woes is not to be allowed 
to exclude the imaginative study of nature, and 
that both studies may count toward culture. 

It is one lesson of the nineteenth century, then, 
that in every field of human knowledge the con- 
structive imagination finds play — in literature, 
in history, in theology, in anthropology, and in 
the whole field of physical and biological re- 
search. That great century has taught us that, on 
the whole, the scientific imagination is quite as 
productive for human service as the literary or 
poetic imagination. The imagination of Darwin 
or Pasteur, for example, is as high and produc- 
tive a form of imagination as that of Dante, or 
Goethe, or even Shakespeare, if we regard the 
human uses which result from the exercise of 
imaginative powers, and mean by human uses 
not merely meat and drink, clothes and shelter, 
but also the satisfaction of mental and spiritual 
needs. We must, therefore, allow in our con- 
templation of the cultivated man a large expan- 
52 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

sion of the fields in which the cultivated imagi- 
nation may be exercised. We must extend our 
training of the imagination beyond literature and 
the fine arts, to history, philosophy, science, 
government, and sociology. We must recognize 
the prodigious variety of fruits of the imagina- 
tion that the last century has given to our race. 
It results from this brief survey that the ele- 
ments and means of cultivation are much more 
numerous than they used to be ; so that it is not 
wise to say of any one acquisition or faculty: 
With it cultivation becomes possible; without it, 
impossible. The one acquisition or faculty may be 
immense, and yet cultivation may not have been 
attained. Thus, it is obvious that a man may 
have a wide acquaintance with music, and pos- 
sess great musical skill and that wonderful im- 
aginative power which conceives delicious melo- 
dies and harmonies for the delight of mankind 
through centuries, and yet not be a cultivated 
man in the ordinary acceptation of the words. 
We have met artists who were rude and un- 
couth, yet possessed a high degree of technical 
skill and strong powers of imagination. We have 
53 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

seen philanthropists and statesmen whose minds 
have played on great causes and great affairs, 
and yet who lacked a correct use of their native 
language, and had no historical perspective or 
background of historical knowledge. On the 
other hand, is there any single acquisition or 
faculty which is essential to culture, except, in- 
deed, a reasonably accurate and refined use of 
the mother-tongue ? Again, though we can dis- 
cern in different individuals different elements 
of the perfect type of cultivated man, we sel- 
dom find combined in any human being all the 
elements of the type. Here, as in painting or 
sculpture, we make up our ideal from traits 
picked out from many imperfect individuals and 
put together. We must not, therefore, expect 
systematic education to produce multitudes of 
highly cultivated and symmetrically developed 
persons ; the multitudinous product will always 
be imperfect, just as there are no perfect trees, 
animals, flowers, or crystals. 

It has been my object to point out that our 
conception of the type of cultivated man has 
been greatly enlarged, and on the whole exalted, 
54 



THE CULTIVATED MAN 

by observation of the experiences of mankind 
during the last hundred years. Let us as teach- 
ers accept no single element or kind of culture 
as the one essential ; let us remember that the 
best fruits of real culture are an open mind, 
broad sympathies, and respect for all the diverse 
achievements of the human intellect at what- 
ever stage of development they may actually be 
— the stage of fresh discovery, or bold explora- 
tion, or complete conquest. Let us remember 
that the moral elements of the new education 
are individual choice of studies and career among 
a great, new variety of studies and careers, early 
responsibility accompanying this freedom of 
choice, love of truth, now that truth may be 
directly sought through rational inquiry, and an 
omnipresent sense of social obligation. These 
moral elements are so strong that the new forms 
of culture are likely to prove themselves quite 
as productive of morality, high-mindedness, and 
idealism as the old. 



\ 



OUTLINE 

I EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

1. The meaning of efficiency i 

2. Training should not cease with youth I 

3. All education comprehends two processes, power 

and knowledge 2 

4. Two accepted propositions relating to studies . . 5 

5. The training and care of the body 6 

6. The habit of quick and concentrated attention . 1 1 

7. The power of consecutive thinking 13 

8. The discernment of beauty and excellence . . .18 

9. The lawful and productive use of liberty . . . .21 

10. The passion for truth 23 

11. The motive power of enthusiasm 27 

II THE NEW DEFINITION OF THE CULTIVATED 

MAN 

1. The cultivated man as an educational end ... 33 

2. A definition of the truly cultivated man .... 34 

3. Cultivation, not genius, our standard 35 

4. Science and service modify our humanistic cul- 

ture 35 

5. Skill and labor are essential to culture 37 

6. The increased importance of character .... 40 

57 



7. The power of literary appreciation and expres- 

sion 42 

8. The necessary knowledge of nature and men . . 44 

9. The training of the imagination 47 

ID. Systematic education will not produce perfect 

results 53 



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U . S . A 



Editor, Henry Suzzallo, Professor of The Philosophy of 
Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New 
York. 

NUMBERS READY OR IN PREPARATION 

General Educational Theory 

EDUCATION. An essay and other selections. By Ralph Waldo 
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THE MEANING OF INFANCY, and The Part Played by Infancy in 
the Evolution of Man. By John Fiskh. Readv 

EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY, and The New Definition of the Coll 
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MORAL PRINCIPLES IN EDUCATION. By John Dewey, Prffes^r 
of Philosophy, Columbia University. Readv 

OUR NATIONAL IDEALS IN EDUCATION. By Elmer e! 
Brown, United States Commissioner of Education. In i>rei>aration. 

THE SCHOOL AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION. By Henry Suzzallo. 
Professor of the Philosophy of Education, Teachers College, Columbia 
University. In preparation. 

Administration and Supervision of Schools 

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS. By Paul H. Hanus, Professor of Educa- 
tion, Harvard University. /« f>rei>aration. 

CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION ByE. P.Cubberly 
Professor of Education, Leland Stanford Jr. University. 

THE SUPERVISION OF SCHOOLS. By Henry SuzzaHo/prfiofof 
the Philosophy of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. 

In Preparation. 

Methods of Teaching 

SELF-CULTIVATION IN ENGLISH. By Gborgb Herbert Palmer, 
Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University. Ready. 

ETHICAL AND MORAL INSTRUCTION IN SCHOOLS. By George 
Herbert Palmer, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University. 

Ready. 

TEACHING CHILDREN TO STUDY. By Lida B. Earhart, In- 
•tructor m Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columba Univer- 
sity. {Double Number. ) Readv 

TYPES OF TEACHING. By Frederic Ernest Farrington, Ass^o- 
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